Thoughts on Perl and Emacs, technology and writing

Moose Types

Rants about generalisations notwithstanding, I’m a fan of typeful programming (I’m sure I’d love Ada). For a script that will be moderately complex, I like to sit down and think about the types I’m going to use before I start.

Any library that will enable me to specify my types more precisely and concisely is obviously a win.

And speaking of Moose…

Moose has a bunch of methods to specify your types and a built-in type hierarchy available that you can build off.

Checking for a LegalDrinkingAge type here is obviously the wrong thing to do, but for the purposes of the example it will do.

The resulting error is fine, if a little ugly.

$ perl5.10.1 moose-types.pl
1
Parameter #1 ("17") to main::can_legally_drink did not pass the 'checking type constraint for LegalDrinkingAge' callback
at /u/packages/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/MooseX/Params/Validate.pm line 168
MooseX::Params::Validate::pos_validated_list('ARRAY(0x976ce40)', 'HASH(0x911b6f8)') called at moose-types.pl line 24
main::can_legally_drink(17) called at moose-types.pl line 33